The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [49]
He was told by all, officers and enlisted men, that his sermons helped the men feel better about life in the army. This encouraged him. Robbins was ebullient on April 20, when he stood in front of two regiments of seven hundred men each on the shores of Lake George, the beautiful wide body of water with its thickly forested shoreline his backdrop, and led them in loud prayers and spirited hymnal singing before they boarded their boats for another leg of the journey north.
Robbins lived with officers in small tents that accommodated from two to four men. He did not care for some of them, continually complaining about their profanity and “wickedness” and writing that “it would be a dreadful hell to live with such creatures forever.”
For the men, though, the dreadful hell was illness. “’Tis terrible to be sick in the army,” Robbins lamented. “Such miserable accommodations. It is enough to kill a man’s spirit when first taken to go into the hospital.”
Robbins and the men with him sailed north on Lake George, thirtythree miles long and from one to three miles wide, and then on to Fort Ticonderoga on the southern shores of Lake Champlain. None of them were prepared for the grotesque specter that greeted them as they were shown the cemetery there. The very upset minister wrote, “[We] saw many holes where the dead were flung in, and numbers of human bones, thighs, arms, etc. above the ground. Oh, the horrors of war. I never so much longed for the day to approach when men shall learn war no more and the lion and lamb lie down together.”
The army sailed across Lake Champlain, ever closer to Canada and Quebec, in “gondolas,” sixty-foot-long, two-masted schooners with open decks to carry supplies and troops. The chaplain joined the men in rowing the boat when the winds died down. They all talked of the coming battles and their fear of dying in them. Many were frightened. The minister knew that he might lose his life, too, despite his clergyman rank. Robbins prayed for his own safety and asked God to give him strength to be brave, to survive, and to help others make it through the storm ahead. “The prospects at Quebec look very dark,” he wrote. “Oh, that I might be able to trust in God and not be afraid.”
What Robbins and everyone else feared was not just fighting the British and the hundreds of Indians they had enlisted as their allies, but the smallpox epidemic there. The American army had become a victim of the fatal disease in December, just before the failed assault on Quebec. Those in Arnold’s army who had survived the trek to Canada were exhausted, hungry, and wore tattered and damp clothes that they rarely took off. Their huts and tents held more men than they should have. These conditions created an ideal climate for smallpox. General Richard Montgomery, who had smallpox as a young man and was immune, commandeered a building owned by the East India Company in Montreal and he appointed Doctor Isaac Senter as its administrator with orders to turn it into a six-hundred-bed hospital to house smallpox victims. They increased every day. Dr. Senter noted then that “the smallpox still very rife in the army.”1 A field hospital set up between the towns of Sillery and Cove to handle smallpox victims filled up quickly and doctors there said